The No. 7: bringing the world home to Queens

Bavir Coffee Shop owner Marta Nersesian in her store

By Gary Baumgarten
CNN Radio Correspondent

February 23, 2000
Web posted at: 11:59 a.m. EST (1659 GMT)

In this story: Feeling closer to home From city to country RELATED STORIES, SITES

NEW YORK (CNN) --The blends sold at the Barvir Coffee Shop in Queens reflect the clientele who stop there. Both have come from around the world to the New York City borough.

Variety is what makes the shop and Queens successful -- that, and the No. 7 train.

Yes, the No. 7, the line made famous when Atlanta Braves relief pitcher John Rocker made disparaging remarks about New Yorkers in a Sports Illustrated interview.

Some of what Rocker said in that controversial article is true: Many people from around the world do ride the 7 train, whose stops include Shea Stadium, home of the Braves' rivals, the Mets. They live and work in ethnic enclaves along the route -- communities that can, for the price of a train ticket, give you a peek inside an array of cultures.

Recognizing the train's unique route through so many ethnic neighborhoods, the federal government recently designated the No. 7 train a Millennium Trail. It's the only train line in the nation to have that distinction.

For Marta Nersesian, who owns the coffee shop where the 7 passes, the train represents the city itself. "New York is supposed to be a melting pot," she says.

Multi-ethnic street scene, Queens Blvd

The shop is proof of the city's diversity, too. She's Colombian, her husband is Armenian and their helper is a native-born American.

Nersesian pauses to speak to a regular customer in Spanish. "In here we speak many languages," she says.

She has to be multilingual. Nersesian estimates that 90 percent of her customers are from Europe, with the rest tracing their roots to Asia and South America.

With so many diverse people living closely together, Nersesian also has learned to observe a worldwide array of holidays in her shop. "I consider myself fortunate," she says. "I've been able to learn a lot from each culture."

Feeling closer to home

Like Nersesian, Jackie Calderon's livelihood is dependent upon people from someplace else. Through the doors of her American Immigrants storefront office on 43rd Avenue walk people whose first language is Spanish, Polish, Korean or Hindi. They come for help filling out immigration and citizenship papers, for translation services, for assistance in getting divorces. For some, confused and frightened in a new land, she represents hope that life will get better.

Taiwan enclave, Flushing, Queens

"A lot of them don't understand legal forms they get in English," she says, "so they come here."

Calderon's work makes her a good barometer of ethnic trends in Queens. Demographers estimate that the borough is home to people of 120 different nationalities -- the most of any county in the United States.

The train is a rolling example of diversity, she says. "At (one) stop you will find people from India," says Calderon. "And at the stop after that, people from Columbia. Further down there are a lot from the Dominican Republic."

All of them, she says, get along together. "This is a peaceful neighborhood," she says.

It's a neighborhood that makes life in a new country a little easier, too. Ask Dave Kelly, a recent immigrant from County Gallway in Ireland who who tends bar at Sean Og's Irish Pub. He says working in the pub, located near the 7 and patterned after one by the same name in his native country, helps make a faraway homeland feel a little closer.

"You don't get homesick here," Kelly says. "It's like living at home."

From city to country

The growth of communities along the line did not happen haphazardly, says Ilana Harlow, a folklorist with the Queens County Council for the Arts. They followed a track whose placement was part of a grand design.

Street scene along Indian enclave of 74th Street, Jackson Heights, Queens

City officials established the train in 1917 to disperse large numbers of immigrants who'd settled in Manhattan's Lower East Side, says Harlow, who's documented diversity along the line. They looked to Queens to ease the crunch downtown.

"Queens was rural then -- lots of marshes and a lot of farms and villages," she says. "It offered people a better quality of life and a quick and inexpensive commute to their jobs in Manhattan."

For decades, she says, the area was home primarily to European immigrants, people who traced their origins to Ireland, Italy and Germany. Then, in the 1960s, Asians and Latinos began moving in after the federal government eased immigration laws.

The region continues to grow and change, with some communities composed almost entirely of people who came from the same villages in their native countries, she says.

"Sometimes it starts with just one person moving here, who sends word back home," Harlow says. Nearly overnight, she says, the neighborhood is flooded with new arrivals who are friends or relatives of that first settler. In time, another ethnic enclave takes root.

"Pinky," a clerk in Chahat's Fashions, shows off fabrics

They're enclaves worth exploring, she says.

"I find that people who visit the area are exposed to a lot of different cultures," Harlow says. "And when they like things that they see, they adopt them."

But what of those who live within walking distance of the 7 train? Do members of the various groups mingle? Or do they keep to their own kind? Harlow recalls posing those queries to an Irishman.

"(H)e put it this way: ‘The Irish don't go into the Latino bars and the Latinos don't go into the Irish pubs. But they both go into the Chinese restaurants,'" says Harlow. "I guess that about sums it up."

For information about the No. 7 line and about the ethnic communities it serves, telephone the Queens Council for the Arts, 718-647-3377.

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